Tuesday, 26 November 2013

HIKER MEAT - REVIEW

THE DARK ROOM OF THE SOUL - THE LOST CINEMATIC VISIONS OF JESUS RINZOLI

By Steve Balshaw, Film Programmer, Grimmfest

“No art passes our conscience in the way film
does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our
souls.” - Ingmar Bergman

There was a point when I started
to wonder if I’d dreamt it. Conjured it up piece by piece from my
trash-film-saturated psyche, and assembled it, Frankenstein-style somewhere in
my subconscious, while sleeping the sleep of the damned. After all, I’d seen it
only once, or so I believed, on a poor-quality VHS, probably a bootleg, from a
video rental store in Monton, Salford, of all places; a store that lives on in
the grateful memories of all who shopped there due to its… eclectic… collection
of titillating titles and questionable-quality dupes. This was back in that
golden, bygone age, when the BBFC had no jurisdiction over what was being
released onto video for domestic rental. An era of Anything Goes, when
fly-by-night companies with the ethics of grave robbers and the publicity
instincts of pornographers unleashed whatever the god-damn hell they could get
their sweaty hands on before the bleary, bloodshot eyes of an appalled public:
American exploiters from the Drive-in and Grindhouse circuits; mean-spirited
semi-underground slashers, dripping with angst and misanthropy; blaxploitation;
Eurosleaze; gory Italian gialli;
zombie and cannibal films galore; mad-eyed martial arts massacres; cynical,
catchpenny retitlings of trashy old TV movies and all manner of other dire and
dated dreck. The store itself now seems like a fever dream; a pre-Video
Recordings Act paradise, filled with tabloid-troubling titles and
soon-to-be-banned sleazy shockers. Here they all were, jostling for my
adolescent attention; grimy, grainy, garish, and utterly unregulated; every
film that would sooner or later find its way onto the DPP’s infamous “video
nasties” list.

It was here, one rainy Autumn afternoon, that I first
discovered HIKER MEAT.

I don’t know what I was looking for when I found it,
or what I was expecting when I decided to rent it out. It was 1982; I was sixteen. And the title had
a strange, but promising ambiguity. Hitch-hikers were a staple ingredient in
horror cinema, particularly in the US, but they were also staples of the
seedier kind of sexploitation. The image of the sexualised female hitcher was a
recurrent one throughout the late 60s and well into the 70s, in films such as
HITCH-HIKE TO HELL, THE HITCH-HIKERS, TEENAGE HITCH-HIKERS, SCHOOLGIRL HITCH-HIKERS,
and PICK-UP. As an avid reader of the lurid pulp novels
cranked out by New English Library back then, I might even have been thinking
of the series of “Sally Deenes” sexploitation novels, written by one “Petra
Christian” - allegedly a pseudonym for prolific N.E.L. scribe Peter Cave,
working in tandem with Grimmfest’s old friend Christopher Priest, though Priest
dismisses this as slanderous rumour. Even so: HIKER… MEAT(?!). Roll that title around in your head a moment, see what
images it conjures up. Something visceral and gory in the manner of Gary
Sherman’s RAW MEAT, perhaps? Or something a little more… taboo?
Some foul and hate-filled abduction porno atrocity, spawned in the foetid
imaginings of Shaun Costello or Zebedy Colt? Or even an uncomfortable
amalgamation; the kind of hardcore hard-gore horrorshow that occasionally
escaped from Italy, usually with Joe D’Amato’s name (or one of his many
pseudonyms) attached somewhere. Of course, this is my older self, more
cine-literate, better-informed, making suppositions. To my teenage self, such
names would have been unfamiliar, and their works almost unthinkable, however
dark I then believed my imagination to be.

Anyway, I rented it, took it home, watched it, told
everybody about what I’d seen, advised my friends to check it out. But none of
them was ever able to find it on the shelves, and not long after, the store
went out of business for trading in bootlegged copies of big Hollywood
blockbusters. And then the whole “video nasties” scandal broke, and following
that, in 1984, the Video Recordings Act was introduced. And the world of home
viewing was never the same again.

But HIKER MEAT stayed with me, a defining film of my
youth. Paradoxically, though, over time, the precise details of it began to
blur, to become jumbled up with other films from that impressionable era of my
life. The more I try to retain a coherent sense of it, the more elusive my
recollection of it becomes. Only the oneiric opening sequence remains vivid in
my mind: woodlands, wild flowers; a young woman in a white cotton Summer dress
or possibly a nightgown, drifting though a garden; birdsong, clearly not real.
The girl bends to pick some flowers, sees a black butterfly, an eruption of
ants from the dry ground. The screech of a hawk overhead, and suddenly the
woods loom before her. She wanders in, pulsing synthesizer music low on the
soundtrack, sudden jagged bursts of sound, wordless vocal effects - a soft,
choral humming, susurrus, sharp female gasps. Cut to a child and mother, picnicking
in a clearing, even softer focus, slow-motion movement - a memory within a
dream, perhaps? The sun is covered by sudden clouds, and a fall of rain
disrupts the picnic. As the mother and child play in the rain, the girl
continues deeper into the woods, the ground growing muddy underfoot. Then,
suddenly, amid the dry-ice-misted trees a dark, silhouetted figure, watching…

And here the confusion begins. Because, surely,
that’s a scene from Sergio Martino’sgiallo classic, TORSO, or something very like it? Segue to the
woman, running now, the camera chasing her, the score building as she reaches a
deserted cabin, pounds on the door. A POV shot, rushing towards her out of the
dark - this is THE EVIL DEAD, now, isn’t it?
And yet… and yet. There’s still that pulsing, synth-heavy, oppressive
Euro-Prog-Rock score, with its eerie choral vocals: Goblin, perhaps, or Fabio
Frizzi; a far cry from Joe LoDuca’s score for Raimi’s seminal zombie shocker.
The girl struggles with keys in the lock, drops them, scrambles to find them on
the ground - and as she does so, a hand reaches out from inside the cabin and
grabs her wrist, jerking her awake. Or maybe I’m conflating the
scene in my head with the final sequence of
Brian De Palma’s CARRIE.

And therein lies the problem. Some films, no matter
when I saw them, no matter how young I was at the time, remain whole in my
mind. It is possible, years later, for me to recall plot details, character
nuances, lines of dialogue, whole sequences almost verbatim. HIKER MEAT,
despite the powerful impression it made on my sixteen-year old self, exists
only as a series of flashes and fragments. I can piece together the events of
the film into some kind of order but I retain no real sense of a consistent,
cohesive narrative, only a series of confused, confusing, and entirely
contradictory impressions. Some of which I fear I may well have made up, or
allowed to be coloured by other, subsequent cinematic experiences.

After the almost operatic opening dream sequence, the
film shifts to a flat naturalism, the bombastic Euro prog rock yielding to the
kind of drifting folk rock found on the soundtracks of dozens of freewheeling
early 70s American Road Movies. Our heroine is, it turns out, a hitch-hiker, a
free spirit, fleeing perhaps from the past that haunts her dreams, on the road
to wherever she ends up. And where she
ends up, at the suggestion of one of her rides (who just happens to hail from
there), is Jamestown, MA. The name derives from the historic, and ill-fated,
original English settlement in Virginia, but is also clearly intended to bring
to mind Jonestown, home of the infamous People’s Temple Cult commune, whose
mass suicide at the behest of their leader the Rev. Jim Jones in November 1978
would have been very much in the news around the time HIKER MEAT was most
likely made. I say this because - guess what? - Jamestown is itself home to a
commune, presided over by a mysterious and charismatic leader, Octavian, whose
intentions are far from life-affirming.

The commune, Camp Pharos, presumably takes its name
from the mythical lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of The Ancient World,
which suggests that the place might have started out with some high-minded
aims. But now it seems more like a generic Californian “Summer Camp” than an
enclave of revolutionary or spiritually enlightened hippies. No murderous
Manson Family members or Jonestown Kool-Aid guzzlers here. Just eager-beaver
all-American kids in brightly-coloured skimpy sportswear,
their sights set no higher than sex, beer and weed. This influx of generic,
disposable teens, of a kind common to every bad 80s slasher movie, from FRIDAY
THE THIRTEENTH on down, is another jarring shift, not just in mood and tone, but
also seemingly in time. It is as if the production stalled for five or more
years, then restarted, with no attempt at retaining continuity with earlier
scenes. Fashions and hairstyles have changed, the camerawork and film stock are
harsher, brasher, the editing cruder, choppier, faster. Even
so, our freedom-seeking hitcher heroine settles in
quickly (though she often seems to have been edited into
scenes from footage shot several years earlier), and soon
becomes one of the gang, singing folk songs, playing ball, drinking,
drugging, fucking; generally behaving in a manner that, in Reagan-era horror
movies gets you killed.

Except… there’s something other than a maniac on the loose here. As harvest
approaches, it becomes apparent that Jamestown harbours a terrible secret.
There’s no Wicker Man up on the hill, awaiting sacrifice, no Two Thousand
Maniacs waiting to inflict bloody Southern hospitality on those damned Yankees.
But Camp Pharos does turn out to be a prison camp, presided over by Octavian,
not only the cult leader, but the town’s mysterious and wealthy benefactor,
determined to restore Jamestown to its glory days by reactivating the local
mine. Complete with slave labour. And here my recollections really get
jumbled and confused, just as the film itself does. I don’t think Dyanne Thorne
is there, though Ajita Wilson could be. It’s that kind of labour camp. There
are Nazis. Or Satanists. Or Cultists. Or maybe just wealthy capitalists. It’s
all pretty much the same thing anyway. I have a vague image of Charles Grey
dressed in purple robes, but I think that might be from THE DEVIL RIDES OUT.
Maybe it’s Adolfo Celi in a white suit, but that could be from Corrado Farina’s
anti-fascist, anti-capitalist vampire parable HANNO CAMBIATO FACCIA [THEY HAVE
CHANGED THEIR FACE]. I find myself thinking Octavian could have been played by
John Philip Law or Eusebio Poncela, but he probably wasn’t. The character has
that kind of fine-boned, debauched pretty-boy face, anyway. The film flirts
briefly with mild S&M tropes derived from Nazi-sploitation and Women In
Prison movies, and then there is a revolution among the miners, sparked by our
hitch-hiker heroine. This leads to carnage in a barn, or maybe a cellar. A
murderous maniac finally does show up - a black-gloved giallo killer, with glowing red eyes, who dispatches several
luckless teens before, in a final, jaw-dropping twist, we discover that, behind
it all, controlling Octavian, is an ancient worm creature, that lactates some
kind of life-prolonging, narcotic fluid, which the mine has been set up to
harvest. I have an image of vats of white fluid, with something writhing in
them, but I might be thinking of Larry Cohen’s splatter-satire, THE STUFF. The
worm is nothing like the one in Ken Russell’s LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM, however -
it more closely resembles a “graboid” from TREMORS, or one of the beasties from
THE BOOGENS. In the end, everything is destroyed, and everyone is killed, apart
from the hitch-hiker heroine, a jock hero she’s picked up along the way, and,
just possibly, the undying worm, howling in the depths of the collapsed and burning
mines.

The overall impression is one of “what the hell did I
just see?” A film that shifts mood and style, defying narrative logic,
motivation, character and continuity, as it moves from giallo to grind house, sexploitation to crude socio-political
satire. It seems less to have been directed than assembled, cobbled together
from disparate sources, some American, some European, and from the looks of it,
over a period of several years. As such,
though I did not know it at the time, it is not entirely untypical of a certain
type of European exploitation cinema; the kind spawned in the Ids of
bandwagon-jumping producers, or maverick madman
directors, then cynically re-cut and re-titled several times over, each time
hoping to catch the latest trend or ride the coat-tails of the most recent
box-office hit. Such cheap-jack, catchpenny creativity chimed perfectly with
the ethics and business practices of the early days of home video, and a lot of
very sleazy people no doubt made a considerable amount of fairly dirty money.
It was a marriage made in hell, and the shelves of those early video stores
were filled with the resulting ill-formed, idiot bastard offspring; many of
which, over the years, I have grown uncomfortably familiar with, in all of
their various truncated and face-lifted incarnations. And most of which are far
darker, more disjointed, demented and disturbing, than HIKER MEAT.

Yet it was HIKER MEAT that stayed with me most
vividly. Perhaps the very fact that it was my first exposure to such ramshackle
movie-making methodology was what caused it to make such a lasting, albeit
confused, impression. The film helped shape my aesthetic tastes: forever after,
I was drawn invariably to the forbidden, the unacceptable, the “outsider art”
of cinema. HIKER MEAT prepared me for the work of Jean Rollin, Jose Ramon
Larraz, Ulli Lommel, Jose Benazeraf, Eloy
de la Iglesia, Giulio Questi, and in particular for
the work of Joe D’Amato and Jesus Franco; prolific, provocative and entirely
uncategorisable filmmakers who defy all notions of taste and acceptability,
whose work is sleazy, opportunistic, mean-spirited, more than occasionally
pornographic, often repulsive; throwing together exploitation tropes in ever
weirder, wilder patterns, seemingly without rhyme, reason or even a semblance
of logic; recycling everything, stitching
together entire films ad hoc from off-cuts and out-takes. They should be an
anathema to the serious cineaste, and yet…And yet they are not without talent.
They are not without intelligence, or at least low cunning Their very
taboo-busting, boundary-crossing anomalousness,
unthinkable now in our current era of focus-grouped,
intellectual-property-fixated, cookie-cutter cinema, makes them worthy of
consideration, at least; maybe even of serious study.

Time was that such a notion was the preserve only of
the more eccentric and left-field critics, the genre fans and cult movie
cultists; such visionaries as Tim Lucas, Kim Newman, Pete Tombs and Cathal Tohill
(whose book IMMORAL TALES did so much to raise awareness of and interest in
EuroSploitation). But now there are entire university courses dedicated to
horror and cult cinema, with lectures on LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, and seminars
on SPERMULA. Distributors such as Shameless and Arrow release everything from
cult classics to cinematic car-crashes on BluRay and DVD, each of them lovingly
remastered and restored, packaged and promoted with the same kind of love and
attention to detail that Criterion and Eureka and the BFI lavish on more
reputable cinema - indeed, with its recent “Flipside” label, the BFI has itself
been throwing several cult film curveballs in with the more experimental work.
All manner of once-forbidden cinema is now widely available, jostling for
position on the shelves of Fopp and HMV, alongside established world cinema
classics, HBO boxed sets, collections of 1970s BBC sitcoms,
and meathead action movies in which Jason Statham hits people a lot - and
nobody bats an eyelid. Films I have spent half my life, a great deal of effort,
and more money than I care to admit to, trying to track down, can be found in
every high street store for under a fiver, so readily available now that I
can't even be bothered to pick them up.

HIKER MEAT, however, has continued to elude me, and as
a result it has continued to obsess me. Because, in many ways, for good, or
more likely for ill, it defined the trajectory of my life. It was the film that
first made me start to think seriously about Cinema.
About what it was, what it could do. About aesthetics and politics, about high
art and hucksterism. I'd always liked film, but HIKER MEAT made me love it,
fixate on it to the exclusion of everything else. Film became my drug; it
became my life, and what passes for my career. The fact that I am a film
programmer and curator today is down to the impact of that one film. And I
cannot find it anywhere.

Believe me, I've tried, over the years. Throughout the
80s and 90s, I haunted the video and film collectors' markets, with their seedy
dealers in dubious bootlegged nasties and illegal imports, pored over the
classifieds in film and music magazines, and got on uncomfortably close
first-name-terms with some decidedly creepy collectors of the questionable and
the downright illegal. But nobody could hook me up. It was as if, having given
me that first, albeit mild, taste of something forbidden, something wrong, the film just... disappeared.

Of course, the likely explanation, or so I convinced
myself, was simply that it had been recut and retitled several times since the
version I saw, and in the process had become both untraceable, and a very
different film. After all, the likelihood that it was ever actually called
HIKER MEAT at all, outside of that shoddy early 80s UK video realise, seems to
me pretty damned improbable. But I'm stubborn and
bloody-minded and I never admit defeat easily, so I persisted. After all, with
the internet, it was just a matter of time before I hit pay dirt. Because
everything – everything – is
out there online somewhere, right?

So I scoured the endless film-related sites, the
blogs, the users' groups, the forums, the chatrooms, the file-sharing sites,
hoping to find a torrent or download of the film, or at least some fragment of
information, some slight clue as to its whereabouts, at the very least some
tentative confirmation of its existence. And I found nothing.

I discussed it with colleagues in the world of film
curation and festival programming, with film critics and filmmakers, and
received only blank looks or pitying glances. I used up all of my contacts
around the world putting the word out, and I got nothing back.

And then, a couple of years ago,
something very odd happened. An entry for the film suddenly appeared, on IMDB
of all places. Right there, in plain sight. Confirmation that it existed.

Except that, upon
closer examination, the IMDB listing proved to be an elaborate joke. The
credits are entirely and very conspicuously fake. But within their very
fakeness seem to be some very blatant clues. Of the listed cast, George Hudson,
Anna Bergman, David Hills, Una Pierre, Robert Yip, Romano Gastaldi, Donna
Aubert, Andrea Massai, and Lynn Clark (There is an actress called Lynn Clark,
but this is not her), are all pseudonyms used at one time or another by
Aristide Massaccesi, better known as infamous Italian exploitation legend Joe
D’Amato, as is one of the supposed producers listed, Fred Sloniscko, jr . Of
the remaining actors credited,
Cliff Brown, Toni Falt, Raymond Dubois, Joan Vincent, Dennis Farnon, as well as
editor Juan G. Cabral, producer David Khune, screenwriter Wolfgang Frank, and
executive producer Roland Marceignac are all pseudonyms for
Jesus Franco, while Candy Coster, listed as an actress here, is a pseudonym
used by both Franco and his muse Lina Romay for some of their more pornographic
films. Indeed, the only two names here that are not pseudonyms for D’Amato or
Franco, are Enrico Birribicchi, DOP and camera operator on a lot of D‘Amato
films, and Sarah Asproon, which is the name of the lead character in D’Amato’s
ELEVEN DAYS, ELEVEN NIGHTS films, and also the pseudonym used by screenwriter
Rossella Drudi on all of them. And though IMDB currently has separate entries
for both Birribicchi and Drudi, this is hardly an infallible source of
information, and so it might even be possible that these too are yet more
facets of D’Amato himself.

It is worth noting in passing that
neither D'Amato nor Franco appears in the film, though they were both prone to
onscreen cameos, and while it is just about possible that the film does mark some
hitherto unknown and unsuspected behind the camera collaboration between them,
this seems unlikely. A more probable explanation is that this is simply a very
conscious and explicit nod in their direction. It could just be a prank, of
course; a thumbing of the nose at the IMDB generation and all it stands for
(take a look at the top 250 films of all time according to IMDB – it
makes for depressing reading). And as such, it's certainly the kind of prank
that Franco at least, with his love of self-referential in-jokes and cinematic
nods to friends and idols, would have appreciated. But I doubt he was actually
responsible. This smacks more of a film buff with too much time on his hands
and a love of mischief and muddied waters.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's a clue; an acknowledgment
of debt, perhaps, of influence. A filmmaker who worked with them, maybe, or one
who learned from their films, took them as some kind of unwholesome role
models. Which brings us to the key name on the credits that
isn't a known pseudonym for either Franco or D'Amato –
HIKER MEAT's director and co-writer, Jesus Rinzoli. Not a KNOWN pseudonym, no.
But it doesn't sound like a real name, either. An internet search
yielded nothing. Another dead end. But at least I had a name at last, after all
these years. Even if I didn’t quite believe it to be real.

But while the cast and crew credits are largely
unhelpful, the music credits are a different matter. These at least could be
traced - and perhaps through them, the identity of the shadowy Jesus Rinzoli
might be determined.

Or so I thought at first. Much easier said than done.
The music credits, as it turns out, while legit, presented a few problems of
their own. The Sun City Runners, whose 1979 MCA Records release
“Losing My Way” appears over the opening titles, were
not, as might be imagined, an early incarnation of experimental Phoenix
Art-rockers the Sun City Girls (who formed at around the same time), but an
obscure side project of author and musician Jim Carroll; seemingly influenced by
/ a parody of his friend Patti Smith’s sometime lover Sam Shepard’s old band
The Holy Modal Rounders. Carroll suffered a fatal heart attack in 2009, and the
only other identifiable musician on the record, Brian Bojangles Hook can be
numbered among the “People Who Died” listed on Carroll’s most famous recording
- he was murdered by the Hell’s Angels over drugs, pretty much as described in
the song. Oddly enough, there are rumours that the Sun City Girls’ Charles
Gocher played drums on the session, but these remain unfounded, and I suspect
derive primarily from the similarity of the band’s names. In any case, Gocher,
too, is no longer around to confirm or deny the story - he lost his long-term
battle with cancer in 2007. MCA Records was swallowed up by the
Geffen Empire in 2003, and attempts to obtain any kind of information from them
has thus far proved entirely fruitless.

Which leaves us with Lustfaust. One of the more
playful and mischievous of the mid-70s German Krautrock bands, Lustfaust always
delighted in confounding expectations, and blurring fact and fiction wherever
possible. An improbable nexus of classically trained Belgian born avant garde composer and pianist Guido
Van Baelen, Japanese electric guitar and synthesiser wizard Matsushita Kazuki,
(black sheep grand-nephew of Matsushita Konosuke, founder of Panasonic), and
experienced session bass player Hans Berger and drummer and percussionist Peter
Kruger - both of whom claimed to have played with the Beatles during their
stint at the Kaiser Keller - the band met during a party at a squat in
Hamburg’s historic Gängeviertel district. Their very name
was selected to cause confusion: a highly conspicuous acknowledgement of their
own musical heroes, Faust, it resulted in all manner of mistaken bookings,
misattribution of songs, and at least one court case from an irate Faust fan.
Their extensive discography is now known to contain several fakes, created in
association with graphic artist, music critic and electronica pioneer Matt
Howarth. Some exist as nothing more than a title and a brief description;
others were mocked up as elaborate gatefold record sleeves containing cardboard
“dummy” records. Discovering the name Lustfaust on the credits of a film,
therefore, causes alarm bells to ring. At the very least, it underlines the
possibility that the IMDB listing is no more than a prank. Lustfaust themselves
are unavailable to confirm or deny anything, having long since retired from
public life, to live on a commune somewhere in one of the remoter parts of Iceland
(Hopefully one that isn't presided over by an immortal worm monster). Initial
attempts to contact them via their one-time road manager Wilhelm “Wild Bill”
Kaiser proved entirely unsuccessful, and an email to Matt Howarth via his
website met with no response. Finally, it occurred to me that a musician friend
of mine had played with Damo Suzuki’s Network in Manchester a few years back,
and they had kept in touch. It was an extremely long shot, but I knew that back
in his Can days Suzuki had been good friends with his fellow German-based
Japanese ex-patMatsushita Kazuki, and so it was just possible
they had kept in touch. I asked my friend to put some feelers out, see what
came back. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting anything at all, but within 24
hours, I received an email, to an address I don’t normally give out. It read, simply:

Give
up on this. Do not pursue it any further. The answers you will find are not
ones that you will wish to hear.

- MK.

This, I will admit, was a bit of a shock. A total lack
of response or a polite expression of disinterest was one thing, but to be
warned off with what sounded almost like a threat… well, that just put the bit
right between my teeth. What the hell was going on here? Just what had I
stumbled into? Was the film - and Matsushita Kazuki’s warning - simply one last
elaborate Lustfaust prank, or was there something… darker at play?

Granted, HIKER MEAT is hardly LA FIN ABSOLUE DU MONDE,
which, legend has it, sent an entire audience violently insane during its sole public
screening at Sitges Film Festival in 1975. Nor is it the incendiary and
long-banned fetish porno THROAT SPROCKETS, which the LAPD still blame for an
outbreak of vampire-like sex killings in and around the Hollywood Hills in the
early 90s, and the cult of which still reputedly persists in some of the more
lawless parts of Latin America. But the film could hide some sinister secrets
nonetheless. After all, as Jonathan Gates noted in his classic monograph, Max
Kastle’s classic B-Pictures for Monogram and Republic are filled with complex
occult and gnostic symbolism, with subliminal and overlaid imagery that the
mind barely registers, save as a profound feeling of unease and discomfort.
Gates’ theory that the films were indicative of the workings of a sinister
cult, right in the heart of Hollywood would seem ridiculous had he not himself
disappeared in so mysterious a fashion so soon after the monograph was
published. Could something equally dark and dangerous lurk in among the
scratched and grainy frames of HIKER MEAT?

I had to know more. But, however determined I was to
continue, my quest had pretty much stalled. I had no way forward, no avenues
left to explore. And then fate took a hand. By this point, I was film
programmer here at Grimmfest, which brought me into contact with all manner of
interesting folk - not only filmmakers and distributors, but writers, critics,
obsessive genre fans. Precisely the kinds of people with whose help I could
continue my search for the elusive Jesus Rinzoli and HIKER MEAT. Even so, I
found my references to the film invariably greeted with nothing more than blank
incomprehension. And then last year we screened a rather wonderful Spanish
werewolf movie, LOBOS DE ARGA / GAME OF WEREWOLVES, and the film’s director,
Juan Martinez Moreno, came over for the festival. The film was filled with all
manner of droll homages to classic European and in particular Spanish horror
cinema, and so we got talking in the bar after the screening about Paul Naschy,
Jesus Franco, etc. And in the process, inevitably, I brought up the subject of
HIKER MEAT and the elusive and probably fictional Jesus Rinzoli. Juan stared at
me in amazement.

“You’ve actually SEEN that?” he asked.

“Well, yeah. My God, you’ve actually HEARD of it?!”

“Of course. My DOP shot it.”

“What?! What’s his name?”

And that was how I finally found out the truth. Juan
put me in touch with his DOP, veteran cinematographer Joan Jesus Grau, who had
indeed been (uncredited) camera on HIKER MEAT, as well as on a whole host of
other similarly sleazy and malformed movies during his misspent youth, and we
began a lively correspondence about his many extraordinary adventures during
the golden era of EuroSploitation, which someday soon we hope to turn into a
book. For now, though, and as a taster for the forthcoming memoir, the low-down
on Jesus Rinzoli…

It’s not an altogether happy story. Jesus Rinzoli was
indeed a pseudonym, one of several, used by one Oscar Artiles Murillo, who had
started out as a film critic and lecturer in Literary Theory at the University
of Salamanca. Like a number of film critics of that era, he eventually moved
into filmmaking, and sought to put his theories of cinema into practice.

A fervent Deconstructivist, Murillo / Rinzoli was
drawn from the outset to genre and exploitation movies. Deconstructivism seeks
to explore the complex contradictions and internal oppositions upon which any
text is founded; to expose the instability of those foundations and thus
demonstrate that a text is not a unified
whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; itis
open to many interpretations, and
all of these interpretations are bound irrevocably and inseparably together. In
the eccentric works of filmmakers such as Franco and D’Amato, with their
inappropriate genre-splicing, bizarre random narrative elisions, and ad hoc
logic he saw Deconstructivism in its purest form; films that actively
deconstructed themselves, continually threatening to fall apart under the
weight of their own internal contradictions. He set out, consciously and
deliberately, to create what he called Deconstructivist Exploitation Cinema. He
intended his films, as he explained to Grau, to be composites; collages, that
would utilise over-familiar visual and narrative tropes, drawn from what he saw
as “trash genres” in a manner that would subvert them and call them into
question. His plan was to lure in the exploitation audience then surprise and
challenge them with something more subversive and radical, something
meta-cinematic. He wanted his films to feel neither American nor
European, but to suggest some blurred, uncertain amalgamation
of both; to have no unified aesthetic vision, but rather
a jumble of styles, an incoherent splurge of clashing themes and plot
elements, deliberate repetitions and recycled clichés.

HIKER MEAT was conceived
to be what Murillo / Rinzoli termed an “aggregator of exploitation cinema”.
It was his thesis that such cinema had become so standardised, so formalised,
that he could quite literally assemble his own film, piecemeal, out of scenes
taken, and directly copied, from other films. To this end, he immersed himself
in exploitation movies for over a year, taking copious notes of the recurrent
themes, images, character archetypes, patterns of dialogue. In the process, he
compiled a collection of visual sequences that he intended to replicate,
virtually shot-for-shot, in his own film. He deliberately selected the most
striking, most familiar scenes, from the best-known movies; the
intention being to continually remind the audience that “it’s only a movie” -
and it’s one they’ve seen a thousand versions of before. He used his notes and
collection of clips as the template for a generic meta-screenplay in which each
action would reflect one of the many sub-genres of exploitation. Hitchhiking
scenes derived from Carsploitation
movies, prison scenes from Nazisploitationand Women
In Prison films, dream
sequences from gialli. Somewhat
naively, he didn’t concern himself at all with issues of copyright; his belief
being that the films he was borrowing from were themselves already second or
third hand versions of something else anyway, shameless cash-ins on somebody
else’s success. Moreover, this was an academic exercise, a thesis in celluloid.
He had A Higher Purpose in what he was doing.

Such hubris invariably comes before a fall. Having
secured initial seed money from the University in the form of several
ingeniously-juggled research grants, and attracted the interest of a number of
potential local investors, ranging from property tycoons to merchant bankers,
Murillo / Rinzoli took the nascent project to Cannes, in search of a producer
and studio backing. This was the late 70s, the golden era of EuroSploitation,
and our academic would-be auteur found himself mixing with some of the very
filmmakers whose work had inspired his own. As Grau tells it, Jesus Franco and
LinaRomay were holed up in the very
same hotel, shooting random filler footage and sex scenes for however many
films they were working on at the time. Murillo / Rinzoli got talking to Franco
in the bar one evening, and discovered a far more canny and self-aware
filmmaker than he expected. He also found himself roped in as an unpaid AD on
Franco’s guerrilla shoots around the hotel. The experience paid off, however,
when Franco introduced him to Swiss producer Erwin C. Deitrich of Elite Film,
who was willing to match existing finance, produce, and distribute the project
that would eventually come to be known as HIKER MEAT.

And here the problems began. Deitrich was as good as
his word on the finance, but proved an infuriatingly hands-on producer. Murillo
/ Rinzoli had wanted his film to star Swedish starlet Christina Lindberg of
THRILLER / THEY CALL HER ONE-EYE infamy and sometime Fassbinder associate Ulli
Lommel, who had just begun to make a name for himself as a director with an art
house approach to exploitation that can only have endeared him to our hero.
Deitrich, however knew better, insisting that his current protégé (and
girlfriend) Suzann Korda, take the lead role. Lommel had to back out of the
film, after a violent row with his then girlfriend Anna Karina put him in
hospital just as shooting was about to start, and his role was taken by one
Mario Almirall, a Salamanca dental surgeon who had been one of the film’s
initial investors. Lacking the requisite exploitation star power was bad
enough, but the director was continually hampered in achieving his vision by
Deitrich, who was far more interested in dollars than in Derrida, and made
constant “suggestions”, that increasingly began to sound like orders as the
filmmaking progressed. The finished work, HIKER MEAT (Deitrich’s title), while
it retained a lot of Murillo’s footage, was considerably recut and restructured
before its release, and thus does not really reflect his original intentions.

Chastened by the entire experience, Murillo was ready
to return to Salamanca, tail between his legs, and material for an angry new
book about the realities of exploitation cinema seething in his brain. However,
the contract he had unwisely signed with the wily Deitrich committed him to
making three films, of which HIKER MEAT was only the first.

Trapped by his own lack of film business acumen, he
tried to make the best of a bad deal, stubbornly applying his Deconstructivist
aesthetics to two more Elite Film releases:

EMANUELLE SULL’ISOLA DI ZOMBIE / EMANUELLE ON ZOMBIE
ISLAND, which Murillo directed under the name “Dennis Shand,” was the only one
of the infamous series of cash-in sexploiters not to feature the beautiful Dutch-Indonesian
actress Laura Gemser, but instead starred the statuesque sex-star, and reputed
transsexual, Ajita Wilson, alongside such genre stalwarts as Howard Vernon and
Gabriele Tinti. One suspects that the casting of the ambiguously-gendered
Wilson was an attempt by Murillo at subversion, which paid off only in so far
as this proved the least successful film in the series. The film’s reinvention
of the sex-tourist journalist protagonist as a gun-toting, two-fisted action
heroine, however, is rather amusing.

CANNIBALI IN UN CARCERE FEMMINILE / CANNIBALS IN A
WOMEN’S PRISON, directed as “Jack Le Con” is precisely what one might expect
from the title - a queasy and uneasy splicing together of Women In Prison soft
core sexploitation with hard gore flesh-eating, that fails both as titillation
and as horror, though it does feature an amusing cameo from Jesus Franco as the
prison’s degenerate doctor, and, in pitting two such contradictory exploitation
tropes so violently against one another, it certainly achieves the director’s
Deconstructivist aims.

Alas, Murillo’s career as an auteur was all but over.
His films proved financially unsuccessful for the most part, and he and
Deitrich parted company, not altogether amicably.

There remains only one final credit on his filmmaking
CV, not as a director, but as AD, under the name “Vernon Sullivan”, on Mathieu
Jean’s notorious JE CRACHERAI SUR VOTRES
CULS / I SPIT ON YOUR ASSES, a feverishly mean-spirited rape-revenge
porno, starring Karine Gambier, Brigitte Lahaie and Paul Le Grand,
the less said about which the better. I’d
like to think that Murillo found some small amusement in working on a film
based (however loosely) on a parody hardboiled novel by the polymath surrealist
Boris Vian.

I’d like to think so, but I fear this is not the case.
Oscar Artiles Murillo died of an overdose of barbiturates in a Barcelona hotel
room in 1983. He was fifty years old. His legacy pretty much died with him. His
films were retitled, recut, re-imagined, recycled, just as I suspected. Little
of his original vision remains, and what does is scattered across dozens of
other films, attributed, rightly, wrongly, or pseudononymously to other
directors.

And there is where our story ought to end. But it
doesn’t.

Run a Google search for Jesus Rinzoli nowadays and
something very strange happens. Suddenly his name appears in a myriad of
entries, in association with that of an artist, Jamie Shovlin, who specialises
in what I guess might be termed elaborately-constructed hoax artworks. From a cursory
glance at the various articles and features thrown up by the search, it would
appear that Shovlin’s latest project, ROUGH CUT apparently a co-commission between Cornerhouse Artist Film and Toronto
International Film Festival, is a documentary film which “explores the making of the gloriously sleazy Hiker Meat - an imagined 1970s
exploitation flick by (fictitious) Italian director Jesus Rinzoli.”

Further research uncovers the following, from a
Cornerhouse press release:

“Rough
Cut will be followed … by Jamie Shovlin’s biggest visual
arts exhibition in the UK to date, Jamie
Shovlin: Hiker Meat, at
Cornerhouse. It will be curated by Cornerhouse’s Director of Programme and
Engagement Sarah Perks, who said:

“The exhibition aims to capture the genesis, and
collaborative process of delivering, the Hiker
Meat project. It opens with an old-school media museum installation about
the Hiker Meat ‘film’, featuring
costumes, memorabilia, maquettes of our 2013 set and the remains of the real
thing.

“Gallery two will reveal a wealth of Jamie and the
team’s background thinking, processes and planning. The ‘re-filmed’ sections of
Hiker Meat will take centre stage in
the final gallery, alongside parallel footage of different stages of the
production process, creating a truly immersive experience.”

What the hell…?

I contacted Cornerhouse, obviously, and persuaded them
to send me an online link to the documentary feature, ROUGH CUT. I watched it,
scarcely daring to breathe, all the while looking for clues. I watched Jamie
Shovlin and his crew trying to replicate scenes from the film I had seen so
long ago, while pretending all the while that they had in fact derived those
scenes from other films. Clever, very clever. They had clearly done their
research, found the films that Murillo / Rinzoli had himself drawn on for his
composite creation, and were utilising these for reference. I watched them
trying to fake California in the Lake District, and 16mm footage on a DSLR
camera. I watched as the young DOP discussed the difficulties of the shoot.

A DOP called John Grey.

And suddenly all of my alarm bells rang at once. “John
Grey.” Of course. It’s a fake name, obviously. An Anglicisation of Joan Jesus
Grau. Shovlin and his team couldn’t resist the temptation to include one little
in-joke, a clue to the hoax they were perpetuating.

Because Joan Jesus Grau wasn’t just the DOP on HIKER
MEAT. He was a highly prolific cameraman. And among his credits is Second Unit
work for his cousin, Jorge Grau, on the classic Spanish shocker, THE LIVING
DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE, the bulk of which was filmed, you guessed it, up
in the Lake District, where the fake footage for the allegedly fake HIKER MEAT
was shot. The film’s opening sequence, however, is of 70s Manchester, and of the
junction of Oxford Road and Whitworth Street - which is where the Cornerhouse
now stands.

A coincidence? Maybe. A conspiracy? Perhaps. But to
what end?

Why would anyone go to so much trouble to try to
pretend that a film doesn’t exist? It could, of course, be a simple matter of
copyright; an ass-covering exercise, born out of anxiety that using the film in
this way will result in a lawsuit from Edwin C. Deitrich, or whoever currently
holds the rights. But this seems a rather excessive length to go to. Especially
when, for all of their attention to detail, they couldn’t even get Murillo /
Rinzoli’s nationality right.

In an interview about the project, conducted by Jamie
Carruthers for Zombiehamster.com, Shovlin speaks passionately about his love of
genre cinema:

“ I have a very direct relationship with these films.
I understand my own relationship to them from being a pre-teenage boy through
to someone who is older.” Sharing the sentimental attachment to VHS rental that
many other horror fans hold so dear, he fondly recollects having to convince
his local shopkeeper that he was permitted to watch these films. “I’m exploring
the warm nostalgia for that time, but also the kind of awkward shame that went
along with it.”

Shovlin offers a narrative of youthful video store
shopping that echoes mine, and that of film fans of my generation generally.
For a moment, I found myself won over; almost willing to believe that this
entire project was the result of an obsession with film - and with HIKER MEAT
in particular - that rivalled my own. But a quick Googling of his name reveals
that he was born in 1978. He is thirteen years younger than me. He is simply
not old enough to remember the era he talks of with such fondness.

Which suggests that his true motivation in taking on
this project must lie elsewhere. Further research into his career reveals that
this is not the first time Shovlin has done this kind of thing. And at this
point, things just get weird. Because his previous project, Lustfaust: A Folk
Anthology 1976-81, was essentially an
archive of material relating to what he claimed was an entirely fictitious
Krautrock band. Except, of course, Lustfaust actually existed. But they were notorious pranksters. I can see
how, having themselves added entirely fake entries to their own discography,
they might agree to be part of such an elaborate double-bluff hoax; that,
having turned their backs so utterly on the music business, they might wish
also to remove all traces of their career, and pretend that they never existed
at all.

Take this thought a stage further: Bearing in mind the
almost threatening tone of the email I was sent by Matsushita Kazuki, or at
least by somebody using his initials, is it possible that Lustfaust have
extended this desire for abnegation to their involvement with HIKER MEAT; that
Shovlin’s latest project was in reality originated by members of the band?

Only
Jamie Shovlin knows for certain. And here’s the thing: I’m starting to suspect
he doesn’t exist. Back in 2004, there was an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery
of a collection of drawings by missing 13 year old schoolgirl Naomi V. Jelish,
alongside pages from her diary, and newspaper cuttings relating to her
disappearance. These were later all revealed to be an elaborate fabrication,
the first major work of Jamie Shovlin, and “Naomi V. Jelish” was simply an
anagram of his own name. Interviewed at
the time, Shovlin claimed: “I wouldn’t call it a hoax. It’s misdirection” [The
Guardian, 16/07/07]. His aim, he said was not simply to fool the
audience, but rather to let them gradually realise that
they were being tricked, and encourage them to question their preconceptions.

The
key word here is “misdirection”, that age-old magician’s trick. Get an audience
to believe one thing, to accept one version of reality, and you can slip what
you are actually doing right on by them, entirely unnoticed. Shovlin apparently
encourages us to question our preconceptions, so I did - and I found myself
wondering: what if Naomi V. Jelish wasn’t the anagram at all? What if the
anagram, and the fictional identity that went with it, was “Jamie Shovlin”?

A
crazy notion? Well, perhaps. But among my correspondence with Joan Jesus Grau
there is an email which lists (as best as he can piece it together from his
production notebooks of the time), the actual cast and crew of HIKER MEAT. And
it would seem that the film’s Art Director is one Naomi V. Jelish.

Grau
recalls her as follows: “Deitrich
brought her in. She was German. An art school drop-out from Hamburg. Very
political, very radical, as young people were in Germany back then. She was the
one who suggested Lustfaust should do the music. They were friends of hers from
her squatter days. She and Murillo became very close during the shoot. They may
even have been lovers for a while. She was the only one who really understood
what he was trying to do with the film, I think. All of that academic,
intellectual stuff. The rest of us were just trying to bring it in on time and
on budget.”

An
exercise in misdirection, then. That’s what this whole wild goose chase has
been. That deft sleight of hand which causes us to “pay no attention to that
man behind the curtain.” What Frank L. Baum, in THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ,
termed “smoke and mirrors”. Far from being “truth at 24 frames-per-second”, as
Jean-Luc Godard claimed, Cinema is a huge hall filled with thick smoke and
distorting fun-house mirrors, refracting and reflecting everything back at you.
It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. To search for any absolute truth is to
chase a McGuffin.

Now
that chase is at an end. And we are none the wiser for the journey.

Somewhere
out there, in a bar in Soho, in a squat in the Gängeviertel, stretched
out by a hotel swimming pool on the French Riviera, Naomi V. Jelish, or
whatever she’s currently calling herself, takes another sip of ice-cold
champagne, and salutes us all, with the sneering words of John Lydon at the
collapse of the Sex Pistols’ final gig: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?”

Tuesday, 3 September 2013

The Grimm Festival Programming Team has
always tried for a balance between the popular and the profane; striving always
to secure the films our audiences are keenest to see and are already talking
about, but also to seek out the lesser known films; the stuff that will have
them talking long after the festival is over. And this year is no exception.

Where we have changed things a little is in
the launching of what we are terming the GrimmFest Fringe, over at the Lass
O’Gowrie. This is essentially a development from what, in previous years, has
been termed the “breakout screen”: it is where we will be showing some of the
more left-field, challenging, independent films of the festival, alongside
shorts and other events. It’s the place to find overlooked and
under-appreciated cinematic gems, alongside some of our more controversial
content.

Thus, we kick off on Thursday with the UK
premiere of TO JENNIFER. This is the latest film from James Cullen Bressack,
whose previous, debut, feature, the deeply troubling “found footage” home
invasion shocker HATE CRIME was one of the talking points of last year’s festival, shaking
even our horror-hardened Grimmlins with its raw, visceral, confrontational
style. TO JENNIFER is a quieter film, its violence more emotional, and its
horrors more psychological. But it is no less troubling for all that. Shot
entirely on an iPhone, it sees Bressack continuing to experiment with the
possibilities of the “found footage” format, and the spurious sense of
“reality” it offers. The film is presented as the work of Joey, a geeky and
intense young man, who has begun to suspect that Jennifer, the love of his life, is cheating on him. He
decides to travel across country to meet her, enlisting a couple of friends to
make a film of his adventures, which he intends to present to her as evidence
of his commitment. Essentially a darkly funny road-trip movie, leading to a
final confrontation, TO JENNIFER is also an exercise in deception, owing as
much to “unreliable documentary” films such as CATFISH as it does to other
found footage horrors.

Staying with the
“found footage” format, Thursday also sees the UK premiere of HOUSE WITH 100
EYES, which chronicles the attempts of a suburban couple to create their latest
snuff film, complete with such “DVD” extras as “”Director’s Commentary” and
“Alternate Takes”. To this end. their house has been set up with cameras in
every room, recording everything. The film is presented as having been pieced
together from footage sent anonymously to a documentary filmmaker, thereby
providing answers to the two questions which always tend to undermine the
credibility of any Found Footage film, namely “Why are they filming this?” and
“If it is found footage, how come it’s been edited so carefully?” In the
process, of course, it does rather disqualify itself from being really
considered a found footage film at all. Not that it matters. Directors Jay Lee
and Jim Roof are more concerned with the process of filmmaking in general, and
in particular with the narcissism and self-delusion of the amateur movie-maker.
Dark and disturbing it may be, butHOUSE
WITH 100 EYES has a strong satiric undercurrent. Smarmy suburban snuff
enthusiastsEd and Susan are oddly
reminiscent of Paul and Mary Bland, the reluctant swinger protagonists of Paul
Bartel’s pitch-black comedy classic EATING RAOUL, andthe early scenes in which the couple are out
and about trying to lure people into their murder van drolly parody a certain
kind of leering gonzo porn. Veering between claustrophic tension, harrowing
scenes of torture and murder, and mordant, extremely cruel black comedy, this
is a film which continually challenges and disturbs the viewer’s expectations
and preconceptions. Which is surely what the best horror cinema is all about.

We’ve also more traditional, but no less
effective independent horror on Thursday with the premiere of HOME SWEET HOME.
This is the first film in English from David Morlet, the French director who
made the criminally-underrated MUTANTS a few years back. We’ve always been
partial to a good Home Invasion movie at Grimmfest, and this is a fine, and peculiarly unsettling, addition to
the genre. It has a careful, cold precision; taking its time with its set ups,
just as the clinical, home invading psycho takes his time in his actions, and
it looks beautiful; elegantly shot on Red, with a skillful use of framing,
camera movement, composition and space to ratchet up tension, in a manner that
John Carpenter and his HALLOWEEN DOP Dean Cundey would be proud of.

All this plus the
shorts: 60s monster movie fantasies come into collision with the horrors of the
real world in ATTACK OF THE BRAIN-SUCKER, a yuppie architect is unable to rid himself of
a one-night stand in THE GIRL AT THE DOOR, and as a
companion piece to the suburban snuff movie makers of HOUSE WITH 100 EYES,
we’ve young serial killers in love, in ANGST PISS AND SHIT

On Friday, we begin with one of our rare
documentary screenings, MY AMITYVILLE HORROR, a highly unsettling portrait of
Daniel Lutz, whose family were at the centre of the famous Amityville Haunting
which inspired so many books and films. Filmmaker Eric Walters takes the
obviously disturbed and damaged Lutz on a journey to try to determine what
exactly happened; bringing him into contact with various eccentric religious
types, para-psychologists, and pulp journalists, each offering their
interpretations, and all of them only confusing matters still further.
Demonstrating that there is more than one kind of haunting, and that some are
far more traumatic than others, this is a thought-provoking and profoundly
upsetting film, likely to provoke strong reactions in the viewer. Which is
precisely why we are screening it.

A film which has been provoking reactions
of an entirely different sort is the much- (and unfairly) maligned SMILEY. An
old-school teen-slashed, featuring a seemingly supernatural online killer and
spinning updated riffs on such genre classics as CANDYMAN and NIGHTMARE ON ELM
STREET, it brings the urban legend into the era of cyber-bullying. Continuing
with the same theme, but in a rather different vein, we have ANTISOCIAL, which
splices the body horrors of David Cronenberg’s seminal VIDEODROME with the
communication-paranoia of Bruce McDonald’s cult classic PONTYPOOL to create a
nasty New Year’s Eve parable about how excessive social media use is turning us
all into zombies. Literally. I’ve always hated people who mess with their
mobile phones during screenings. Looks like I was right to. They are putting
all of our lives in danger. Sure, it’s only a movie - but make sure you switch
your phones off while its playing. We won’t be answerable for the consequences
if you don’t.

All this, plus a striking, surreally
disturbing short from Israel, THE PLAN, and, in readiness for his Q&A in
the evening over at the Dancehouse, SFX, make-up and prosthetics legend SHAUNE
HARRISON will be hosting a special workshop, in which he will be demonstrating
techniques and transforming one lucky Grimmlin into one of the walking dead.

Saturday’s Fringe focuses on issues of
memory, be it a lack, or a superabundance thereof. We begin with a brace of
shorts. First up, OUT THERE, a tale of fragmented recollection and repressed
guilt in the middle of the apocalypse, which sees Randall Plunkett, the current
Lord Dunsany, no less, following on in his illustrious ancestor’s footsteps as
a master of the lyrically macabre. Then there’s SLEEPWORKING, which imagines a
future in which people have inplants in their head which enable them to work
while they sleep. Sounds like something we’re all dreaming of, doesn’t it? Not
really, no. Because the result is a Philip K. Dick style nightmare of colliding
memories and dreams, in which reality grows increasingly tenuous. And waking up
might be the worst shock of all.

This is certainly the case for the
protagonist of MODUS ANOMOLI, today’s feature film, receiving its English
premiere, who wakes up to find himself buried alive in the middle of a forest.
Digging himself free, he tries to piece together how he got there. The answer
is far more disturbing than he could ever suspect… An inventively twisted psychological thriller,
that continually challenges narrative expectation and character perception,
this is very different in tone to the previous Indonesian film to hit these
shores - the bone-crunching actioner, THE RAID. Indeed, in its preoccupation
with buried truths and buried memories, and with its unreadable, ambiguous
protagonist, it might almost seem to offer some allegorical statement about the
complex, troubled, and often troubling, history of its country of origin. It
might not offer the disturbing insights of the recent documentary THE ACT OF
KILLING, but it does seem to be saying something similar about the darker
reaches of the Indonesian psyche. At least, that’s my interpretation. Others
might just like to settle down and enjoy the most unpredictable amnesia
thriller since MEMENTO. Or whatever the last one was. I’m afraid I’ve
forgotten.

But I mustn’t forget to mention CHRISTOPHER
FOWLER. Best known nowadays for his inventively ghoulish short stories, and
genre-bounding novels, which straddle horror, fantasy, and crime fiction,Chris was also one of the founders of
influential media promotions company The Creative Partnership. You know that
film about the chest-bursting Aliens? Remember the poster strapline, “In Space
No-One Can Hear You Scream”? Well, that was one of his. Chris’s latest book,
FILM FREAK, is a memoir of that time, and he’ll be along to regale us with
tales of glamour and excess from his misspent youth, haunting the seedier of
London’s flea-pits in search of cinematic strangeness, and describing how his
early years as an obsessive cineaste led him to a career as a tyro film
promoter in Seventies Soho.It promises
to be an entertaining and enlightening show.

SUNDAY’s fringe presentation is a single
feature. But don’t worry, you’re not being shortchanged. We saved the most
disturbing, most extreme film till last. THANATOMORPHOSE (the title might be
roughly translated as “death transformation”) is the story ofan isolated and unsuccessful young
sculptress, trapped in a somewhat abusive relationship, who moves into a new
apartment, only to find that as her sense of isolation grows, her body begins
to rot.
The glib way to describe it would be as “Zombie Repulsion”, with the female lead’s mental decline here
symbolised by her physical decay. But this really does not do the film justice.
Certainly, it has the kind of claustrophobic, dingy apartment location,
oppressive atmosphere and dark surrealism of Polanksi’s film. But it also has
the flat, deliberate pacing and morbid, morose obsession with sex, death and
decay that characterised the films of 90s cult German underground director Jorg
Buttgereit (NEKROMANTIK, DER TODESKING), and takes the cinema of body horror to
a whole new level. Featuring truly horrifying special effects by Canada’s
infamous Remy Couture, the only make-up artist to have faced prosecution for on
trial for “moral corruption through propagation of obscene material,” it is the
most unsettling, upsetting, disturbing, and downright gruelling film any of us
has seen in a very long time. Pretty much guaranteed to generate controversy,
to be a major festival talking point, it is, in short, a cinematic ordeal, and
is not to be entered into lightly. Consider yourselves warned.

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GRIMM UP NORTH is Manchester's home of Horror, Sci-fi and Fantasy. We run monthly screenings, events and the annual film festival in October.
Grimm Up North! is Manchester's Premiere Horror and Sci Fi Festival.
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Nightmarish narratives, retina-searing images and heart stopping shocks galore. Blood-soaked red carpet premieres, ghoulish guest appearances and much more! www.grimmfest.com